Greg Rossel Profile

In the tiny inland town of Troy, there’s a boatbuilder who is also a teacher, and a writer, and a radio programmer, and a community activist. He is also a man who has helped keep the real in reality.

BY DANA WILDE

44

Dana WIlde(2)

“C.GregRössel then see the World” is pretty clearly a product of his time. Not that he looks like it.

He has the engineer’s hat, spectacles, and (graying) under-chin beard of a nineteenth-century Belfast shipwright. In his yard is parked a bright-green 1954 Willys Jeep pickup. A rotary-dial phone (with coil cord) hangs on his kitchen wall. To get his attention, you pull the clapper of the ship’s bell by the screen door.

Usually it turns out that he’s not in the house at all, but in the workshop up the hill, where he’s been building and repairing wooden boats for 25 years. Rössel migrated to Maine along with thousands of others in the early 1970s, hoping to escape the industrialized, homogenized life of mainstream America and carve out a simpler, more community-oriented existence.

By all accounts, he succeeded. Rössel has built up a well-known, reliable boatbuilding business over the last two decades (the sign by his driveway in

GREG RÖSSEL

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

June / July 2008

|

Issue 100

Spiling planks in the workshop up the hill in back of the house.

www.maineboats.com

|

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

“Stubby,” a pram designed by Robert Monks.

A Cosine Wherry.

courtesy Greg Rössel(3)

Troy prominently yet humbly announces “Boat Carpentry, Repairs and Restoration,” which covers his official business quite well, but not his informal slogan: “C. Greg Rössel, then see the world”). He’s set up woodworking shops and taught seminars in far-flung corners of the world, expanded his horizons to writing and radio, and participated extensively in local government. He’s done all that pretty much on his own terms, formed during the iconoclastic 1960s.

C. Greg Rössel (C. for Carl), 56, navigated to Troy from Staten Island, N.Y., where his grandfather founded the Bentley Yacht Club. As a boy he haunted boatyards and ran errands for the workers. He tooled around the waters of the island’s western shore in skiffs, exploring among the scuttled ships that commerce, technology, and progress had, one by one, made obsolete. He likens his youthful explorations to those of the artist John A. Noble, who plied the same waters in rowing and sailing craft, and made a career of drawing and painting what he saw.

Rössel’s love of the sea eventually propelled him into a marine geology program at Long Island University, but he quickly found the sedentary scholar’s life difficult to take. He worked at odd jobs, including on the cleanup details at oil refineries, which along the Jersey shore were almost as numerous as the scuttled ships. The experience changed the course of his life.

“I was tired of being in a place where corporations were dirtying everything,” he recounts. “I’d go swimming and have a ring of dirt around my shoulders. At the plants across the way there were explosions all the time—people don’t realize that. There was a chemical film on my grandparents’ windows that you couldn’t scrape off. Then when I got a job going right in there and seeing the incredible pollution these plants generate, I just decided that I had had it.”

A Whitehall built in Tampico, Mexico.

45

a wooden boat like this, he’s forced to understand what he’s dealing with.”

Apparently the process worked for Rössel. After he completed the program in 1980, he took a job as assistant director of the boatbuilding program at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. After a few years of the lengthy commute from Troy, he set up shop behind the house he had by that time lived in for more than ten years.

Repair and restoration work on all kinds of boats began to funnel in, and, gathering respect in Maine’s boatbuilding scene, by the mid-1990s he became a member of the Boat School’s Curriculum Advisory Committee. (The school hit rough waters when the University of Maine, which then oversaw it, rethought its mission and location, but Rössel stuck with the school through its changeover to a program within the Washington County Community College, and he expects to remain a director now that Husson College has taken charge.)

©Benjamin Mendlowitz

A lug-rigged sailing skiff built during WoodenBoat School classes.

In tune with the environmental consciousness burgeoning in the 1960s, Rössel decided to seek cleaner waters.

In 1972 he fled northeasterly and became part of the backto-the-land movement that saw an influx of refugees from civilization into the hills and back roads of central Maine.

Many odd jobs followed: roofing, masonry work, carpentry. Several seasons on an organic farm and finally a humdrum gig driving a school bus convinced him that there had to be a more fulfilling way to make a living, and at last he enrolled in the Boat School, in Lubec at that time, where he met instructors Junior Miller and Ernie Brierly.

Rössel speaks reverently of Miller and Brierly, and of instructors Carl Felix and Clint Tuttle, as old-time masters of their craft, and as tough teachers. “When you first got there,” he says, “they wouldn’t even let you touch a boat.”

The students made hatchets, toolboxes, and other gadgets. “The idea was,” Rössel says, “if you could build a small item in wood, you could build anything.”

After getting a feel for the materials and tools, the students learned to draw plans, and when they grasped that process, they were taught to build a scale half-hull model and after that a construction model. Then they learned to loft, or draw the full-sized lines of a boat, and make the many parts and pieces that would become the seagoing unit. The boats were sold for the cost of the materials.

The Boat School course wasn’t for hobbyists. “They ran it like a boatyard,” Rössel says. “You punched a time clock. One unexcused absence and you were out of the program. To come back the second year, you had to find a boatyard job and keep it. When a student learns to build 46

on a chilly spring day, smoke from a wood stove danced out of the chimney. Inside, Rössel was at work on a pulling boat designed by Thomas Fleming Day—building from scratch a 14-foot “accurate copy” of the lapstrake-planked turn-of-the-century craft. The shop’s ancient door swung in and out from time to time, at the whim of April gusts.

Like his teachers, Rössel sees boatbuilding as a craft whose importance transcends the mere production of boats. In the 1970s Brierly and Miller were concerned that “there weren’t guys to work—the skill was dying out,” which led in part to the founding of the Boat School. But in the spirit of the 1960s generation that sought an authenticity and value to life beyond the commercial world of appliances and conveniences, Rössel explained that “there’s more to boats than fiberglass and sales.”

“There are very few things left that you can do from start to finish,” he said. “Building boats is one of them.

Boatbuilding used to be a pastime or a hobby.”

To prove the point Rössel pulled from a wobbly antique desk a thin, faded gray volume of “Build a Boat for Pleasure or Profit,” published by Popular Mechanics in 1941. With teacherly care, he explained that there are three basic stages in building a wooden boat: drawing plans, making patterns, and construction.

Rössel leafed through a large book with numerous pencil drawings, then pointed to the floor. We’d been walking around on the “lofted” version of Day’s pulling boat. The lines had been drawn full size on the floor beneath our feet.

“Old-timers work slow,” he said with a glint in his eye that suggested he takes pride in having learned old-time skills and methods. “But they move right along, and then suddenly everything’s done.”

This is a kind of patience not often seen in the twenty-first-century world of cell phones and BlackBerries (which Rössel, as you would expect, has never owned), and

AT THE SHOP

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

June / July 2008

|

Issue 100

it translates partly from his belief in the value of the simple life and partly from long practice as a boatbuilding instructor.

Rössel has set up shops, including a small familyowned plant in Tampico, Mexico, and taught boatbuilding classes in Florida, Virginia, and Maryland. He has taught classes several times at Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco. For 20 years he’s taught at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine.

Rich Hilsinger, the WoodenBoat School’s director, said Rössel is “in a very real sense a ‘walking encyclopedia’ when it comes to wooden boatbuilding history, theory, concepts, and techniques. Greg has the rare combination of exceptional knowledge, ultimate patience, and dry humor, and the wonderful skill to communicate with people of different abilities.”

“It would be difficult to find anyone more dedicated to the role of boatbuilding instructor,” Hilsinger added.

“Greg can be found each morning in the shop by 5 a.m., preparing material for that day’s class and savoring the first of many cups of coffee. At day’s end, he’s usually back in the shop reviewing students’ accomplishments and tweaking things where necessary. He always puts his heart and soul into the endeavor, and is constantly encouraging his students and always generous with his expertise.”

All kinds of students have benefited from Rössel’s twoto ten-week sessions—diplomats, corporation chiefs, workstudy students, carpenters, CIA agents, plumbers, sign

painters. Members of the U.S. Coast Guard take classes in lofting from him to gain a firsthand understanding of the structure of wooden vessels. Marine archaeologists enroll in his classes to learn how wooden boats are actually made.

“Engineers can be the toughest to teach,” he said.

“They’re into numbers and putting things into a box. But in my class they have to think about the wood in a whole different way, and learn to trust their eye. A boat is only half-submerged; it has all these joints that have to be able to breathe and move. Calculations can be wrong, but I can lower their demanding standards so they can actually build something.”

Boatbuilding classes are “the great leveler” for these diverse groups of students, Rössel said, signifying in an offhand way a deep-set 1960s sense of egalitarianism—he learns as much from the students as they do from him. “Teaching forces you to validate, or approve, what you’re doing.”

courtesy Greg Rössel

“There are very few things left that you can do from start to finish,” Rössel said.

“Building boats is one of them.”

A neat shop is the sign of a dull mind.... www.maineboats.com

|

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

it was only a short step to writing, and beyond. Rössel’s technical and historical articles and product reviews have appeared in periodicals published here and overseas. He has had two books published, Building Small Boats and The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice, and has written another, Kayaks You Can Build, with sometime writing and boatbuilding partner Ted Moores.

Writing has rigors and rewards different from those of boatbuilding or teaching, but Rössel said it all fits together comfortably. The woodcraft underpins the writing— “For one boat,” he said, “I made more on the seven articles I wrote about it than I did on the boat”—and the articles help refine the craftsmanship: “You put your idea out there in the magazines and get feedback from professionals. If anything really bad appears, the audience lets you know.”

Like building, writing has its own tricks of the trade: “An old-timer once gave me the best advice I ever got about writing books,” he said. “Whenever you go in a bookstore always sign your book, because then they can’t take it back.”

Neither boatbuilding, writing, nor teaching is lucrative on its own, but together they provide a comfortable living. And his self-made schedule propels Rössel’s desire to participate as helpfully as possible in the life of his community. A fervent “think globally, act locally” pragmatist, Rössel served on the town of Troy’s planning board for 14 years and helped draft Troy’s comprehensive plan. He serves perennially as the good-humored moderator of the annual town meeting, and he is incessantly active in local farmers’ market projects and fairs. His wife, Norma, is town chair of the Waldo County Democratic Party; her monthly participation keeps Greg securely anchored to state and national politics, as well.

FROM TEACHING

47

all that—boatbuilding to teaching to town government—weren’t enough, Rössel also has become a respected radioman at Maine’s WERU, a volunteer-driven community broadcasting station in Orland (89.9 and 102.9 FM). This may seem like a navigational glitch in a life charted to steer clear of gadgetry and superfluous electronica, but communication sounds as deeply as boats in Rössel’s past. The family’s house on Staten Island was alive with newspapers and books, and there was a developing fascination for the burgeoning communications technology of the 1950s and 1960s.

“My father was into radios” he said. “After World War II he took a correspondence course on the GI Bill and learned to build radios and TVs so he could be independently employed. So our house had radios and TVs everywhere. Radios built into the wall. Lift up a portrait and there’d be a TV in the wall behind it. He taught me to build crystal radios.”

As a teenager Rössel would lie in bed and listen to New York’s diverse radio programming—Bob and Ray, Jean Shepherd—deep into the night. Eventually, he said, “A buddy and I took short-wave classes at the Police Athletic League. We listened to the revolution in Prague [in 1968] when the tanks were coming into the square. It just was great.”

Rössel never thought of actually becoming a broad-

AND AS IF

A Classic Beals Island 22

caster himself. “It would be like waking up and being Britney Spears—or maybe someone a bit calmer,” he says. But in Maine, he heard about a community radio station being started up on the coast by Noel Stookey, and he decided to check it out.

“It was not the crummy, low-end, Casey Kasem commercial radio,” he says. It was a true community effort, and in 1989 he dove into learning programming, manipulating reel-to-reel tape, developing show lists.

He was interested in folk music, but WERU needed a world music program. Game for just about anything, Rössel climbed aboard and the voyage through the “World of Music,” every Sunday evening at 6 o’clock, has yet to end.

“It was everything I thought it would be,” Rössel says.

“It still amazes me it can be that neat of a thing, but it really is.” Surrounded by turntables, logbooks, CDs, knobs, and dials, he says, “You’re telling a story with music. You have chapters and climaxes, put a break in there. And it all has to be seamless. It’s a very different skill set. It has theater, and unlike in teaching, you’re sort of talking to yourself. There’s a certain, maybe, arrogance that someone’s actually out there listening—a one-sided communication that people with mental illness have”— the latter point made with characteristic humor and selfeffacement.

Elegant Exercise

The Heritage

The original sliding seat rowing boats and shells, beautifully hand-crafted by Little River Marine.

The ride says it all: big, beamy,

800-247-4591 • www.Erow.com

dry, the perfect day boat. Never mind the weather! Easily powered with a Yamaha F115 or F150.

Made in Maine by those who care.

Jeff’s Marine, Inc. On the River, Thomaston, ME 207-354-8777 www.jeffsmarine.com dreed@midcoast.com

48

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

|

June / July 2008

|

Issue 100

Matt Murphy, WERU’s station manager, described Rössel’s show as “a wonderful mix of music from all over the globe, expertly and amiably presented.” Murphy and Rössel first met at the Boat School and reconnected later as volunteers at WERU, through Rössel’s stints on committees and the board of directors.

“Greg takes great joy in serving our listeners,” Murphy said. “He’s a well-liked contributor to all aspects of station life, a student of community media who watches trends nationwide and passes on information to his colleagues at the station. A ‘good penny’ if there ever was one.”

Rössel put perhaps the same idea this way: “There’s a lot of community in the community station.” in Troy, it was not difficult to get Greg Rössel to talk—words come quickly and easily to him, as to any good radioman or teacher. But his replies to questions about his life and work persistently morph into stories about other people and events. He has to be repeatedly coaxed back to the topic at hand—himself. This is what Matt Murphy meant when he said Rössel is “a steady and sincere influence who takes the interests of the station and people involved to heart.”

All of Greg Rössel’s activities—boatbuilding, teaching, writing, radio, community activism—seem to involve

AT THE SHOP

a basic question of living an authentic life, of authentic meaning, an ideal derived from Thoreau by 1960s and 1970s cultural radicals, and persisted in by some. This observation seemed to cause Rössel some embarrassment, but after a wince and many seconds of unspoken thought, he agreed.

“Whether it’s the boats or the radio,” he said, “the real deal is important. There’s not enough of it around.

What’s really important about town meeting is that it’s real people, real politics. That means something. The boats mean something to people. The radio is real communication. It’s not something you get out of a can. I like building things for people who appreciate it. You can make them happy.”

At the little boatbuilding shop in Troy, C. Greg Rössel has been making people happy for many years. No sign of his heading to dry-dock can be seen.

Dana Wilde is a freelance writer, and an editor with the Bangor Daily News. His “Amateur Naturalist” column won a Maine Press Association award in 2007 for best local column.

Read Wilde’s review of Rössel’s 2007 book, The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice: The Ins and Outs of Building Lapstrake, Carvel, Stitchand-Glue, Strip-Planked, and Other Wooden Boats (McGraw-Hill) at www.maineboats.com.

TOM CURRY www.tomcurrymaineartist.com | Brooklin, Maine | (207)359-9880

SHOWS: Firehouse Gallery August 14 to September 13, The Neighborhood House August 7, 8, 9

SHIP MODELS Since 1975

R. Michael Wall,

international expert on ship models, offers his services including: Collection development, management, and maintenance; Conservation and restoration; Custom models; Appraisals; Auction vetting AMERICAN MARINE MODEL GALLERY SALEM, MA 01970 wall@shipmodel.com www.shipmodel.com 978 . 745 . 5777 www.maineboats.com

|

MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS

Karen Perry Cottage Specialist

Vacation Rentals That Enhance Your Mount Desert Island Experience P.O. Box 567 Southwest Harbor, ME 04679 p. 207.244.0500 • c. 207.266.7875 e. karen@mainecottageproperties.com w. www.mainecottageproperties.com 49